Technically it’s possible to produce gasoline from air, but …

At first blush this sounds like crazy talk. It sounds like those Irish guys from Stoern who, in 2006, claimed to have developed a process that created “free energy.” The technology, dubbed Orbo, never worked. Shocking, I know.

On second blush, however, there might be something here. The devil, alas, may be in the details.

In any case, here’s how the company says it can turn air into sustainable fuel. The company proposes to use a “mist” of sodium hydroxide to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Hydrogen, having been stripped from the water is then mixed with carbon dioxide to make methanol. In turn this methanol is moved through a gasoline reactor to produce gasoline.

The air fuel synthesis process. (Air Fuel Synthesis)

Now this isn’t entirely crazy.

When you drive your car, you’re extracting energy from gasoline and you produce a number of byproducts, including carbon dioxide and water that go into the air via your exhaust pipe.

In principle, then, this process could be run in reverse, Rice University physicist Paul Padley told me. The chemistry to reverse the process is undoubtedly clever, the key question is how much energy one would have to put into the system to get significant amounts of gasoline from the air.

“They’re not breaking any laws of physics here, so they could be really clever chemists,” Padley said.

For example, it’s conceivable one could use solar power to provide the energy — both to cause the reactions and extract hydrogen from water — needed to produce liquid fuel from air. Emphasis on conceivable. Whether the process is worthwhile depends upon how efficient it is.

I’m skeptical. At this point it sounds more like a plan to harvest cash from naive investors than gasoline from the air.

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In principle, then, this process could be run in reverse, Rice University physicist Paul Padley told me. The chemistry to reverse the process is undoubtedly clever, the key question is how much energy one would have to put into the system to get significant amounts of gasoline from the air.

Of course, it is possible to do what they claim. Plants do it all day long, as does algae. And they do it without massive bioreactors and high pressure tanks. And, given that those processes are much better understood than the Irish team’s idea and are much further along in the development pipeline, I’d invest in them well before putting any money in the Irish team’s hands.

This team is from England, the previous, now debunked team was from Ireland.

Yes, massive amounts of energy may be required, but consider that the process can be made more efficient to use less energy with scaling and creativity, and that someday the cost of gasoline from the traditional methods may approach parity with this process. Stuff changes.

Aluminum used to be a precious metal until the process improved to the point where it became viable.

The key takeaway from this is that it CAN be done. “Being done” and “economically viable” are very different things certainly, but often only separated by time and creativity.

Yes, massive amounts of energy may be required, but consider that the process can be made more efficient to use less energy with scaling and creativity, and that someday the cost of gasoline from the traditional methods may approach parity with this process. Stuff changes.

Yes, it does, lil ol me, which is why I gave the minimum amount of energy needed. Following on that, let’s examine what would be required to use this process to make enough gasoline to make a difference. It’s been estimated that properly inflating tires would save 3% of the gasoline used each year. The US burns 134,000,000,000 gallons of gas each year, so that would be a savings of some 4 million gallons. If we assume that it takes ten minutes to inflate the tires properly and that the ten minutes is worth $1.67 in lost time, then it would cost roughly $424 million to save that gasoline (which itself is worth $14,000 million at $3.50 per gallon), assuming that all 254,212,610 passenger vehicles were serviced.

How much energy would it take to make the same amount of gasoline using this process? At 33.41 kWh/gallon, that’s 134,308,200 MWh, or the equivalent of the output of 126 Ivanpah Solar Power plants (assuming that they have eight hours of full operation each day). At a cost of $2 billion per plant, that means that we would need to spend $288 billion in order to have the minimum amount of energy needed to make the gasoline from air.

So we can spend ten minutes to inflate the tires or we can spend decades building solar power plants. We can spend $14 million in lost time or $288 billion in actual materials. Don’t know about you, but improving efficiency looks better and better all the time to me!

If you could strip Hydrogen from water cost effectively, then why would you convert it to gasoline? You could just burn the hydrogen in your engine. (or use it in a fuel cell.)
Problem is, it will always take more energy to take the hydrogen apart from the Oxygen in water than you can get back when they recombine.
That’s why water is stable (one reason).
No offense to the author, but this isn’t news. You can make gasoline lots of ways that are unaffordable.
Oh, same problem with many renewables. Wind and solar are not “free” energy. They cost more than conventional means of producing power. Look at wholesale electric rates, no wind or solar technology currently available produces power for less.
Maybe one day, but we are not even close yet.

JohnD – Gasoline is much easier to store, but it burns way less efficiently. A huge amount of the electronics in vehicles is related to emmissions.
Hydrogen or natural gas burns really clean. The future is natural gas in vehicles. Any large vehicle is a good candidate for conversion.
We simply need to commit to having more places that offer filling of gas vehicles. Tank technology and incentivising comstruction filling stations would be the best use of any money that the Gov’t would spend on alternative energy.
We have plenty of natural gas and so does the rest of the world.
Cheap and plentiful with no pollution – that’s a huge improvement over gasoline.

True, but that is something that is constantly being improved. In addition, the difference in burn efficiency is not enough to make up for the differences in storage capacity.

And, of course, there are the secondary costs associated with moving to a natural gas economy. I’d invite you to run a similar comparison to the one that I did above on the costs involved in shifting just 4% of our gasoline usage to natural gas (which is at least an order of magnitude less expensive than hydrogen).

In the gas form, yes. That’s part of why many of the storage devices try to put hydrogen into a hydride or clathrate form. It increases the storage density and safety. Unfortunately, such setups range from expensive to very expensive and so work against making hydrogen the fuel of tomorrow.

JohnD, your point is all well and good and I totally agree. BUT you’re missing the bigger point. Its long term viability is not there. We WILL run out of fossil fuels one day and will need to switch over anyway. So starting to move over now, even slowly is not a bad thing(I’m not arguing a green point of view here, just a logical one. I’m a drill baby drill person). The cost is great, but it will happen sooner or later so putting research into an alternative is a good thing. Not only is it good for that reason, but that same research usually ends up giving us even more technology for many other advances. Usually what is discovered in the research for one purpose can serve others even better. I don’t think the Govt should get involved to force us to change or whatnot, but spreading education(which you are doing) and voicing our preference so that private companies are incentivized to invest in that are good things.

We WILL run out of fossil fuels one day and will need to switch over anyway.

You are almost right. What will happen is that we will run out of cheap fossil fuels someday. When that happens, the price of gasoline will climb and lower cost alternatives will become economic. For example, many experts believe that alagal oil will be profitable at $140/bbl; so, when oil prices reach and stay at $140/bbl, algal oil will take off.

The nice thing about the alternatives is that their prices will typically come down over time as new efficiencies and improved manufacturing methods are developed.

The bad thing with the “gasoline from air” method is that it will never be competitive, simply because the energy costs are so high. Those costs are avoided when alternatives are used simply because nature has already developed very cost efficient methods of doing them for us.

The cost is great, but it will happen sooner or later so putting research into an alternative is a good thing.

Believe me, I agree that funding research is the fiscally-sound thing to do in the long term. Had we not cancelled the algal oil programs of the 1970s, we might be using it today. And we definitely would have learned some interesting things about growing feedstocks for manufacturing and medicine.

And the truly sad thing is that we face exactly the same sort of short-sighted thinking today. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are willing to cancel NASA programs and NSF research because it is “pork” (unless, of course, it happens in their district; then it is “essential”). And in doing so, they help delay the day when those advances are made.

Get our fuel from the air? WOW! What about doing it this way. Plant corn, ordinary corn plants right out in the air. This corn will convert t6he air to sugar. Expose the sugar to a yeast and let it do all the work. The yeast will ferment the sugar to alcohol. Then resist the temptation to drink the alcohol and, instead, add it to gasoline. WOW! Gasoline from air. Uh Oh. We have already tried that and it wasn’t such a good idea. Even this resulted in lost energy.

Wait, wait, I hear another cold fusion scam coming from some “scientists”. Give me a call when it can be done on a massive, tens of millions of barrels a day, scale at the same price or less than what the refineries do with crude oil. I won’t be holding my breath.

I think it’s highly unlikely we’re going to create a technology that creates transportation fuels using less energy than we use to let it out of the ground and lightly refine it. Of course, the problem is that we’ve let out most of what’s in the ground, and the refining is getting dirtier each year. It’s not like there’s any more dinosaurs decomposing to make more oil.

Where I think a technology like this makes sense is as a method of storing energy. Batteries lose their charge, electrical power generation is real-time only, the hydrogen economy isn’t here yet, and hydrogen gas outgasses like crazy anyway… Imagine a large solar plant in the desert in West Texas producing gasoline, which you can just put in your tank and burn when you’re ready to go?

It’s not a bad idea. The physics / chemistry to do it is uncomplicated, really. If cost is no object you can create almost any chemical you want. But the efficiency and cost is the kicker, as it always is.

What’s missing from the articles I’ve read about this is the equivalent capital and operating cost (using good solar panels or wind) expressed in a per-gallon wholesale price. If their break-even is $10 a gallon, it’s conceivable there will be applications that make sense in the near future. If it’s $1,000 a gallon, well, there’s a lot of technology between here and that price, so no deal.

Oil refining is getting dirtier, if you believe that tar sands and heavy oil will make up the bulk of the future un-refined product. Now on the other hand, if you bet on natural gas, you would have very little refining and cleaner burning energy. You could argue that natural gas extraction on a large scale is dirty, potentially contaminating groundwater or aquifers, but the long history of hydraulic fracturing has shown that it does not do those things. Rapid technological innovation is happening in the fracturing industry with ideas like propane fracs, different kinds of proppants, even slot drilling as a frac replacement. That industry is going to get cleaner and more efficient every day.

We don’t need more dinosaurs to generate oil and gas. 80% of what we’ve discovered is still sitting in the ground anyway, as technically un-recoverable resources. Americans will find a way to get it. Because individuals own the land rights in this country, there will always be a plethora of oil companies, ideas, innovations, and opportunities.

i read about turning algae that can be grown on the top of waste water treatment plants into a direct replacement for gasoline, I think we should possibly look into that to help with the energy crisis.

The US Navy Research Laboratory recently announced that they are studying converting Salt Water into Jet Fuel. I checked with a chemical engineer friend who said it is theoretically possible. From the Navy’s perspective, this technology would save them operating a fleet of tankers to keep the Navy’s planes and ships running. (Most Navy ships are powered by gas turbines and can burn jet fuel.) Check out http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2012/fueling-the-fleet-navy-looks-to-the-seas

The part that makes me laugh is that the energy input is “renewable energy” with a windmill as the icon. We really could do something like this for transportation fuels and it has been proposed previously (e.g., hydrogen from water used as is or converted to methanol, etc.), but there would have to still be immense excess energy available from static power plants. You could do this will sufficient commitment to Generation III/IV nuclear power plants, but the idea of wind as the input is laughable. In reality, just as it currently is for current electric cars, what you would have is coal/natural gas powered cars with environmental impacts laundered through the intermediary of electricity generation.

Right and what is not being said is that it would take two nuclear reactors to create the power to run the reaction and the amount of CO2 pulled out of the localized area would cause a problem on the surrounding landscape, not to mention the best case they can come up with is producing $5 a gallon gas.

I have an idea. Rather than giving unemployment benefit to thousands of people who pretty much stopped looking for work or sitting on a intersection asking for money in the name of veteran, let’s create some manual turbine (or wind mill) which can be operated by human power then employ these guys/gals. Here we have energy and employment combo and not to forget that fat ass becoming slimmer with all the exercise. I am sure efficient turbine/windmill can be used by lot of third world country’s where people not doing anything anyway.

Forget these oxidation/reduction reactions. Forget cold fusion.
The future is in cavitation. Cavitation reactions have been shown to produce transmutations and wonderful amounts of heat.

The next real breakthrough in engines will be more familiar
to an old steam engineer
than to an auto mechanic that spent his career changing spark plugs.

Metals will be our fuels. Oils will be our working fluid. And anybody that seriously believes that air is going to turn into gasoline and save our civilization has never built the machine that will do it on a 1000 gallon per day scale.

It would take 4 plants, or 8 billion working at 100% efficiency for that same 4 million gallons in the first year. That’s about $2,000 per gallon of gas or 500 years of $4/gallon to be profitable. (correct me if I’m wrong)

Seems like renewable energy, in solar form at least, would be out as a solution unless we could drastically cut the cost AND increase the efficiency.

Tune in tonight at 10 p.m. ET as PBS FRONTLINE investigates the disinformation campaign on climate change. “Climate of Doubt describes the individuals and groups behind an organized effort to attack science by undermining scientists, and to unseat politicians who say they believe there is current climate change caused by human activity.”

In a well-orchestrated counterattack on climate change legislative, diplomatic, and regulatory initiatives , fossil fuel companies and wealthy ideologue donors have funded organizations to wage war against climate science and climate scientists, undermining public understanding and efforts to develop meaningful climate policy.”

I like it because it least shows that we are being innovative. Sure maybe this particular method isn’t viable, but in the end there is never going to be one magic bullet to all of this. It’s going to take many different ideas and methods, I’m glad that these guys are out there. Honestly I think it’s awesome, being able to clean out the air and convert it to gasoline using wind and solar power. A few years down the road and it could totally work.

Converting air into gasoline will cost much more energy than it produces. Look at the current fad, ethanol from grain.
It is wasteful of energy, not to mention food water and money, and is only done because the law imposes it.
John D is right: This will cost a LOT more energy than conversion of gasoline into H2O and CO2. It is a stunt and nothing more.
Innovation would be to find a way to get a useful liquid fuel at cheaper price than gasoline that delivers more energy than it costs.
Great article, by the way.